


Waiting for Pack

by DiscontentedWinter, hisaribi



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Asexual Stiles Stilinski, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-19 11:49:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 14,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14873223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hisaribi/pseuds/hisaribi
Summary: This isn't the first time Stiles has woken up in a different world.This isn't the first time that Peter has been caught in a place where time doesn't exist.Except this time they have each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Story by DiscontentedWinter.  
> Art by hisaribi.

 

 

 

This isn’t the first time Stiles has woken up in a different world.

The first time it was bright, clean, and Stiles’s eyes had been flooded with brilliant light before he’d seen it: that great big fuck-off dirty tree stump in the middle of an otherwise pristine space.

Even now, even with the nogitsune purged from his body, Stiles gets a chill when he sees a sharp-edged shine of a too-clean space. The glossy tiles on the kitchen splashback. The sheen on the chrome napkin dispensers at the diner. The gleaming floor of the corridor at school the moment after the janitor runs the humming polisher over it. They can all take him straight back to the nemeton.

But whenever Stiles has woken up today isn’t clean.

He stares at the toes of his shoes, and a dusty, scuffed floor, and then raises his gaze and looks around.

He’s in the rundown waiting room of a train station.

 

***

 

When Stiles was eight, his mom forgot who he was.

He remembers running through the corridor of the hospital in a rush to get to her room, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. He remembers racing into her room, yelling “Mom! Mom! Mom!” with some story about something that happened that day at school that he’d been bursting to tell her ever since. And he remembers the way she screamed for help, the sound of it pulling him up short in an instant, because she didn’t know who he was.

Cherry cola still makes him feel sick.

He remembers sitting on the floor beside the vending machine, his dad crouched in front of him. He remembers how cold the can was, and how the condensation beaded like tears. He remembers his dad’s voice, strained like it was going to break.

“She loves you, kiddo,” Dad told him. “She loves you so much, but the disease…”

“She doesn’t remember me,” Stiles said, chilled fingers curled around the can. “She doesn’t know who I am.”

“I’m sorry, kiddo,” Dad said. “I’m so sorry.”

“She forgot me,” Stiles said, a breath shuddering out of him. “You’ll forget me too, Dad, one day.”

“No,” Dad said. “No, Stiles. Not ever.”

But he will.

Stiles knows it.

He feels it in the core of everything he is, at the heart of him. He _knows_.

 

***

 

Stiles is a perceptive kid. That’s what Dad calls him: _perceptive_. Sometimes he’ll say something and it will turn out to be true, and his dad will hesitate for just a moment before he latches onto the word again: _perceptive_. Like there’s a rational explanation. Like Stiles has maybe just got the knack of seeing patterns that other people don’t. Like it doesn’t go a lot deeper than that.

Like it’s not written on his bones.

Like Stiles isn’t an oracle.

It’s not conscious. Stiles doesn’t sit in a circle of candles and meditate or whatever. Just that _sometimes_ … sometimes words fall out of his mouth that he doesn’t intend, and they’re _true_. They’re _non sequiturs_ mostly, totally unrelated to what he was thinking about or talking about at the time.

Once, when he and Scott are playing _Call of Duty_ , Stiles is in the middle trash talking Scott when he blurts out with, “Mr. Parsons is going to die soon.”

And Scott just gives him a look like _what?_ And then he says, “ _Who_?”

Because what sort of trash talk is that? Scott doesn’t give a shit about Mr. Parsons, the guy who owns the coffee shop in Main Street. He barely even knows him. Neither does Stiles, but the words tumbled out anyway.

And then, the next day, Mr. Parsons dies when he swerves off the road in a storm and crashes his car into a tree.

Scott doesn’t ask Stiles about it. Maybe he doesn’t hear about it. Maybe he already forgot Stiles’s weird pronouncement. Stiles panics quietly about it though, about how he shouldn’t _know_ stuff like this, and about how even if he does know stuff like this, he shouldn’t say it aloud. He starts to pepper his conversations with all sorts of random bullshit after that.

Hides the weird with even _more_ weird because he doesn’t know what else to do.

When they’re thirteen they’re eating Doritos and watching a movie and Stiles says, “You’re a werewolf.” He blinks. “I’m not in your pack.”

“What?” Scott throws a pillow at him and laughs. “You’re so weird.”

Of course Scott’s not a werewolf.

Not yet.

But Stiles is never in his pack.

 

***

 

The nogitsune buries itself in the marrow of his bones. It wears him like the skin of a creature that it killed. It presses down so hard on his lungs that Stiles is suffocating inside his own body. And when it’s done, Stiles is done too.

He pulls back from Scott and his pack.

Pulls back from Derek and his.

He can’t… they don’t need someone like Stiles in their packs. They don’t.

“I’m not in your pack,” he says to Scott, and then says the same thing to a glowering Derek the next week.

It’s the truth. It’s always been the truth, and it will always be the truth.

Stiles is waiting for his pack still.

Or maybe his pack is waiting for him.

 

***

 

There are two alphas in Beacon Hills. There is Derek Hale, who has a claim on the land that goes back generations, and there is Scott McCall, who is a True Alpha. And Stiles slots in somewhere between them. Sometimes he’s a negotiator, sometimes a mediator, and sometimes he’s a shadow in the rain that slips right past them. It’s okay. He doesn’t want to be anything else. Not while he’s still unfamiliar in his own body, not while he can still watch his fingers twitch against the arm of Derek’s couch and wonder if it’s his will that moved them, or the will of something much older and much darker.

He still comes to pack meeting though. Derek’s, and Scott’s, and joint meetings.

He watches and he listens, and so does Peter Hale, sitting on the steps.

Stiles wouldn’t call what he has with Peter Hale kinship, but there’s something there. Recognition, perhaps, from one outsider to another. Both he and Peter exist on the periphery of both packs. Distrusted, Stiles thinks, and a little distrusting too.

Lydia, Stiles thinks, is a something of an outsider too. She’s still with Jackson, and Jackson is Derek’s beta, but she’s also best friends with Allison, and Allison is in Scott’s pack.

Allison.

Stiles can barely bring himself to look at her, even now, over a year later.

He can still hear the sound of the oni’s sword pushing into her, scraping against bone and severing her spinal column. He can still hear the sound of her scream.

“It’s not your fault,” she’s told him a thousand times, leaning forward in her wheelchair. “It’s not your fault.”

But it is, because Stiles knew it was going to happen.

“Allison will never walk again,” he said to his face in the bathroom mirror when he was eleven, a chill rolling through him that sucked the breath from his lungs.

He didn’t even know her back then, but his words had already condemned her. Already set it in stone. He knew, and he didn’t even try to stop it, because it was the truth, and the truth is immutable.

His gaze is drawn to her now. To her, and to the wheelchair. He turns away again before she catches him looking, and his gaze locks on Peter’s.

Peter is perched on the stairs, like always, taking everything in, like always. Stiles wonders exactly how much he sees, and what conclusions he draws from it.

The lines between the packs are sometimes blurred.

Derek’s pack is the more traditional. Apart from Lydia and Danny, Derek’s emissary, everyone is a wolf: Jackson, Cora, Boyd, Erica and Isaac. Scott’s pack is very different, but maybe that comes from having a True Alpha. Scott picks up strays, Stiles thinks, but he does it in such a warm, inclusive way that it clearly doesn’t matter if they’re not wolves. It doesn’t matter whatever they are. Scott only has one beta werewolf: Liam. The rest of his pack is a mix and match of supernaturals and humans: Allison, Kira, Malia, Hayden and Theo. Mason is Scott’s emissary.

Scott’s pack is such a motley bunch that sometimes Stiles wonders why he doesn’t fit in there. And sometimes he thinks Scott is wondering the same thing.

Stiles watches his fingers twitch on the arm of Derek’s couch and half-listens to Derek and Scott discuss the latest threat to the town.

Deaton had said years ago that the nemeton would draw supernatural beings like a beacon, and Stiles thinks of moths drawn to the light, pinging and pinging and pinging against the bulb until they die.

It seems like a pretty apt metaphor, actually.

 

***

 

Pack nights always finish with pizza. It takes a lot of pizzas to feed two hungry packs. Stiles snags a piece of vegetarian—neither quick enough nor foolish enough to get between a bunch of werewolves and a meatlovers—and retreats to the couch to eat it.

A moment later Peter sits down beside him. “You’re quiet tonight.”

“You’re hardly a Chatty Cathy either, zombiewolf.”

Peter’s mouth quirks up in what might almost be a smile. “Well, perhaps I don’t have anything interesting to say.”

“Same,” Stiles says around his mouthful of pizza.

Peter fixes him with a speculative stare. “Oh now, Stiles, I doubt that _very_ much.”

 

***

 

At the next pack meeting there is nobody sitting on the stairs, and Stiles’s gaze is drawn to the empty space for some reason. Stiles shrugs his unease off, and makes an effort to talk to Erica when she asks him about their chemistry homework. Erica is struggling in chemistry.

He also checks an entry in the bestiary with Danny, promises to help Liam come up with a topic for his English presentation, and shares a pack of Oreos with Cora. He flits around the periphery of both packs, like always, friendly and joking, but always keeping to the edges.

It’s better this way.

It’s late when Stiles gets home. Dad is working, so Stiles climbs the stairs in the dark, toes off his shoes, and sits at his desk and opens his laptop. There’s something bothering him, and he can’t quite figure out what it is. It’s not the eviscerated body of the hiker found in the woods. There’s nothing too unusual about that. This is Beacon Hills, after all, and it’s a day ending in a Y.

It’s something else.

Something vague and nebulous that slips further out of Stiles’s reach the more he tries to grab onto it.

He closes his eyes and rubs his temples.

This is something _different_.

It’s almost like a presence surrounding the town. Or… or the opposite of that somehow.

“A presence, but not a presence,” Stiles mutters to himself. “What’s the opposite of a presence?” He wrinkles his nose. “An _absence_.”

His eyes flash open just in time to see the figure standing in front of him, and it looks like… a _cowboy_?

What the fuck?

_“You’ll forget me too, Dad, one day.”_

_They’ll_ all _forget me._

The figure reaches out for him, and Stiles feels cold flood through him, as though his blood has been turned to ice. He tries to scream, but it’s too late.

 

***

 

When Stiles opens his eyes again, he’s standing in the rundown waiting room of a train station.


	2. Chapter 2

This isn’t the first time Peter has been caught in a place where time doesn’t exist. Unlike the coma though, it isn’t the screaming ghosts of his pack that surround him. Instead, it’s silent. There are people here. Peter tries to strike up a conversation with a woman in scrubs, but she doesn’t respond.

“How did you get here?” he asks, but she only cranes her head to see past him to the board that announces the timetable. “What train are you waiting for?”

It doesn’t take Peter long to sense sharper motion amongst the slow, dull movements of people in the waiting room. He sees a flash of color in his periphery—a shirt, or some other piece of clothing—and when he turns his head to follow the movement, he catches the unmistakable scent of wolves in the stale air.

There are two of them; teenagers. Why is it always teenagers?

Peter’s gaze sharpens, and he follows the teenagers from the main room down into a tunnel and a length of dark track. The closed space opens up again moments later into what appears to be some sort of utility room, or perhaps an inbuilt safe hole for any railway works caught on the track when a train was approaching. Presuming, of course, that this place is based on something real. Peter’s not certain of that at all. But the space exists, and it’s free of the thralls in the waiting room.

Peter leaps up from the tracks.

“Hello,” he says to the two wary teenagers standing there.

Beta eyes flash gold in response and, from around the knees of the boy, a little girl peers up at Peter.

“Hello,” he says again, softening his tone.

The little one’s eyes don’t flash. Whatever she is, she’s not a wolf like the others.

“My name is Peter Hale,” he tells the kids. “And I have no idea what’s going on right now.”

 

***

 

Maybe Peter would have noticed earlier if there’d been anyone to remark on his absence. But no, it had been a rainy Tuesday night in Beacon Hills when Peter had pushed open the door to the coffee place.

The usual barista had been on duty.

“Hi, what can I get you?” she’d asked, as though Peter didn’t come here every damn evening and order the same damn thing.

“Right,” she’d said when he’d given his order. “And what name is that for?”

Maybe, if Peter had actually spent more time with Derek and his pack, he would have noticed sooner that he’d been completely forgotten.

 

***

 

The teenage pups in the train station are anxious, their scents sour with worry as Peter sits down with them. He’s careful to stay out of striking distance, as much for his own safety as to keep them feeling at ease. Their heartbeats are rapid, their eyes flashing.

“How long have you been here?” he asks them.

Time doesn’t have meaning here, he soon learns as he listens to them talk. They relax a little the more time they spend with him, becoming used to his scent, and probably taking some comfort in his steady heartbeat. Peter has burned to death before. He’s not going to panic at this strange dimensional displacement. He’s still alive, so things could very easily be worse.

Sanjeev is fourteen, but he takes the lead over fifteen-year-old Emily. She’s quieter, more reserved. Sanjeev’s walls break down a lot faster than Emily’s: by the time he’s finished filling Peter in on his old life, and on what they know about the Ghost Riders and the train station, he’s shuffled close enough to where Peter’s sitting that Peter could reach out and touch him.

He doesn’t though. He doesn’t want to spook him.

Emily takes a little longer to unbend, but before too long she and Sanjeev are elbowing one another and arguing about whether or not the guy they saw get incinerated that time was wearing a green shirt or a blue shirt.

Peter isn’t sure why it matters, but then, in a place like this one, perhaps remembering the details is important, if only to prove to themselves they aren’t going crazy.

“With your constant bickering, at least I won’t get homesick,” Peter tells them.

Sanjeev snorts, and Emily rolls her eyes.

It’s just typical of Peter’s luck that not only was he abducted by the Ghost Riders, but that he’s ended up as a some sort of defacto caretaker to a couple of teenagers. Why can’t he be surrounded by adults for once? This must be his penance—to be constantly annoyed by hormonal brats with acne and pop culture references that he doesn’t understand.

Of course, it’s not quite like that with Sanjeev and Emily.

Sanjeev is a nineties teen, and has excellent taste in music and movies. He has no idea who Miley Cyrus is, and Peter finds that immensely refreshing.

And Emily was taken while Peter was in a coma, so she’s as much out of the loop on a lot of the same trends that Peter is.

He _likes_ them, and because they’re still pups they are naturally respectful to an older beta, particularly one with the surname Hale. Peter may not remember their packs—the Ghost Riders have wiped even the memory of them from existence—but they remember his. The Hale Pack was both powerful and respected at one time. At _their_ time.

“What do you do without the moon?” Peter asks them curiously. “How have you stopped from going feral?”

“There’s no moon,” Emily huffs. “There’s no _time_.”

“It’s been years,” Sanjeev agrees, “but also like _minutes_? You don’t get tired or hungry. You don’t even need to _pee_. You gotta turn off that part of your brain that keeps track of how long it’s been, or you’ll go crazy.”

“I’ve been crazy before,” Peter says. “I wouldn’t call it a fun time, but I certainly got a lot of things accomplished.”

The little girl in Sanjeev’s lap giggles. She looks no older than three or four, and she’s wearing face paint as though she’s just come from a party. She has whiskers painted on her cheeks.

“And what’s your name, kitten?” Peter asks her.

She grins at him. “Poppy.”

Poppy is a little mystery, but Peter has always liked those. She’s obviously more than human, given that she hasn’t succumbed to the same living death as the people in the waiting room, but she’s too small to tell Peter anything about where she came from. She doesn’t know her surname, and she thinks her parents were called Mommy and Daddy. She likes Sesame Street and piggyback rides. The pups indulge her in both, and it isn’t long until Peter finds himself doing the same thing, on the strict understanding that nobody from the outside world can ever find out about Peter’s Big Bird impression.

Times passes—or it doesn’t—and Peter finds that what grounds him the most are the heartbeats of the two pups and Poppy.

As much as this place is hell, there’s something freeing about it as well. These kids don’t know Peter. They don’t know the monster, and so Peter can be free of that part of himself with them. He can be the person they hope he is—older, smarter, stronger, safe—without having to look at his hands and see his claws dripping with Laura’s blood.

It’s hell, but it’s also something else that Peter is half-afraid to name yet.

If he’s really stuck here forever, well, at least he can comfort himself with the thought that there are worse places.

 

***

 

The kids have been starved for anything new in this place where time doesn’t exist. They might not need to eat or to sleep, but, perversely, they’ve still felt every passing hour. It’s an unmatched sort of torture, both benign and unspeakably terrible, and Peter doesn’t know how they haven’t been driven out of their minds in all the years they’ve been trapped here. But they seize on Peter because he’s new, and he finds himself telling them about Derek’s pack, and about Scott’s, and about Beacon Hills and all the things that are drawn there.

And about Stiles too, who navigates his way between the packs like he’s picking a path through the shifting sands of strategy and alliances; a fool, a trickster, a _joker_ , because your best chance of survival, in the narrow places between two powerful kings, is to be someone who is constantly underestimated. Peter has always been too proud to play the fool, but Stiles… well, he had an easier time of it before the nogitsune, but even back then Stiles was a lot smarter and a lot more cunning than he appeared.

“It’s Beacon Hills, dude,” Sanjeev says, his brow wrinkling. “Not the Byzantine Empire.”

“You have no sense of intrigue, do you?”

Sanjeev grins and shrugs.

“My point is that it’s a precarious position to exist between two packs.”

Emily picks at the thread in her jeans. “Why are you between two packs, Peter?”

Peter huffs out a bitter laugh. “Oh, well that’s a whole other story.”

She fixes him with a look. “So? It’s not like we don’t have the time to listen.”

She has a point.

 

***

 

Laura.

It’s been so long since Peter’s said her name that he’s not surprised it catches in his throat, but he forces it out, and every single word that follows it. He watches the expressions flit by on the pups’ faces: horror, disgust, fear. None of them are new to him.

When he’s done talking, Emily and Sanjeev don’t say anything.

“Peter!” Poppy says, and tugs him by the hand. “Peter, piggyback me!”

Perhaps the pups need time to process what he’s said.

God knows the one thing they have is time.

He rises to his feet, and walks with Poppy toward the tracks.

It’s not until he has her on his back and has jogged up and down the section of the tracks more times than he can count that he realizes: the pups let him walk off with Poppy.

They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t think she was safe with him.

 

***

 

“There’s a boy called Stiles,” Peter tells Poppy as his shoes crunch over the grit on the tracks.

Poppy makes a humming noise, and Peter likes to imagine that she’s asking him a question.

“He’s intriguing,” Peter tells her. “Exasperating, but mostly intriguing. He has a way of knowing things that nobody should know. You would like him, I think. He likes to make silly faces.”

“Silly,” Poppy echoes approvingly, her mouth close to his ear as he piggybacks her along the tracks.

“ _Very_ silly,” Peter says. “But do you know what’s silliest, kitten?”

She hums again.

“Of everyone in Beacon Hills,” Peter says, his voice echoing in the empty tunnel, “I think it hurts the most to know that he’s forgotten me.”

Maybe that was just Peter’s sharp edges, keeping Stiles on guard for even longer than the others. Maybe it was just that Peter looked at Stiles and saw something of a connection between them, a common understanding. Or maybe it was something very different to that after all. Peter had seen the similarities lying between them—insanity in Peter’s case, and possession in Stiles’s, but both marked by a loss of control, and both surrounded by death. A mutual horror. But sometimes, when Stiles laughed and caught Peter’s eye, maybe Peter didn’t just see a shared past connecting them. Maybe he saw a shared future too.

Peter has never been prone to flights of fancy in his life.

Stiles is an aberration, perhaps.

And Peter has always been drawn to the things, and the people, that don’t quite fit the mold.

He has a feeling that Stiles is the same.

“Too late to do anything about it now, isn’t it, kitten?” he asks Poppy, and she hugs him awkwardly around the throat.

Just another regret to push down and learn to live with. Peter is used to those.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Stiles lifts his gaze from the grimy floor, his heart racing.

There are people sitting on the benches in the waiting room. Stiles feels a sharp frisson of fear as he looks at them. How long have they been here? Will that happen to Stiles as well? Will he just sit down and _stop_? They’re alive, breathing, existing, but not _present_. They seem almost vegetative. Just there, taking up space. Just _waiting_.

He sees a man in pajamas. A woman in scrubs. A child in a baseball uniform. People snatched out of their lives and brought here to sit and wait.

 _Waiting_ , Stiles thinks. _Purgatory. You’ll forget me too, Dad._

There have been people going missing for months, and how is Stiles only remembering this now that he’s amongst their number? He doubles over and tries to regulate his breathing before he spirals into a panic attack. He grips a handful of his hair and tugs it, the sharp pain enough of a distraction to keep him centered for a moment longer.

Deep breaths.

“Okay,” he says aloud, and the people seated nearby don’t even look up. He looks up at the board on the wall. “Beacon Hills, Bodie, Bonneville, Pripyat… why the hell have I never heard of any of these other places?” He tugs his hair again. “Holy shit. Holy _shit_. Because they got wiped from existence, and from memory.”

This is wholesale extermination, and Stiles has fallen right into the middle of it.

“Ghost towns,” he says, and then the words aren’t his anymore. They’re coming from that place inside him he has no control over, that place that holds the knowledge of impossible things: “Ghost towns. Ghost _riders_.”

There’s nobody around to appreciate Stiles’s moment of revelation.

Just a room full of blank-eyed people with thousand-yard stares.

Just a room full of people who might as well be dead already.

 

***

 

Stiles walks in circles around and around the waiting room.

He doesn’t need to eat here.

He doesn’t need to sleep.

There’s nothing to do except sit and wait, and Stiles refuses to do that.

He keeps walking.

 

***

 

A crash of thunder, and the waiting room erupts with shrieking panic.

It’s so unexpected that Stiles doesn’t know what to do when suddenly all the people are diving for cover behind the seats and the pillars around the edge of the room. He’s frozen with the shock of seeing these people actually _move_ —and then someone grabs him by the arm and drags him into the shelter of one of the pillars.

“Peter,” Stiles whispers, the thrill of recognition running through him.

He’s not alone. He’s not alone. He’s not alone.

Peter smirks, and presses a finger against Stiles’s lax mouth. “Shh, sweetheart.”

 _Asshole_ , Stiles thinks, suddenly breathless with relief.

_They’ll all forget me._

Maybe not all of them. Peter’s here. Peter remembers.

It’s not much, but it’s something. And it’s enough to anchor him right now and to keep him from sliding into panic.

Stiles watches with a mixture of horror and fascination as the Rider appears in a flash of green lightning, dumps an abductee from the back of his horse onto the floor of the waiting room, and then vanishes again.

He watches as the woman climbs to her feet, and stares numbly around for a moment before she goes and takes a seat.

He watches as everyone else returns to their seats as well.

“Do you know,” Peter says, his breath hot against Stiles’s ear, “that for the longest time I thought I was waiting for a train?”

“Beacon Hills doesn’t have a train station,” Stiles says.

“Clever boy,” Peter says approvingly. “But you’ve always been insightful, haven’t you?”

“Perceptive,” Stiles murmurs. “My dad says I’m perceptive.”

Peter raises an eyebrow. “I’d say it’s a little more than that, wouldn’t you?”

Stiles shrugs.

“Don’t be coy, sweetheart,” Peter says. “If you were just an average dull little human, you’d be sitting over there with the rest of the drones right now. It’s only those of us with a little extra in our DNA who manage to keep our wits about us, although I’m inclined to think that’s more of a curse than a blessing at this point.”

“You couldn’t be more of a pompous ass, you know?” Stiles asks, before it registers what Peter’s said. “Wait. There are more of you here?”

“More of _us_ ,” Peter corrects. “And I absolutely could be more of a pompous ass. Did I ever tell you I own _two_ Shelby 1000 Cobras?”

Stiles didn’t even think it was possible to laugh inside a place like this one.

 

***

 

Peter leads Stiles down onto the tracks, and through a dark section of tunnel that opens up a moment later into some sort of storage area. There’s a teenaged boy sitting cross-legged on the cracked tiles of the floor. He’s wearing a basketball shirt, and he has his arms crossed over his chest. Stiles can’t see the team or the school he belongs to.

The girl sitting next to him looks about the same age. She’s wearing a Starbucks shirt and nametag. There’s a little girl sitting in her lap. She looks no older than three or four. She’s wearing face paint: a blob of paint on the end of her snub nose, and whiskers on her cheeks.

“This is Sanjeev and Emily,” Peter says. “Both werewolves. And our little kitten here is called Poppy. We don’t know what she is, but she’s not quite human, are you, kitten?”

The little girl sucks her fingers into her mouth and stares up at Stiles.

“This is Stiles,” Peter says.

Stiles feels suddenly dizzy.

“You can’t go back,” he says, the words tumbling unbidden out of him. “You’re out of time and you can’t go back.”

It’s the truth and, by the looks on their faces, they already know it.

 

***

 

Sanjeev is from Bodie. It was 1996 when he was taken by the Ghost Riders.

Emily was working a Saturday morning shift at Starbucks in Bonneville in 2009 when she was taken.

Poppy doesn’t know where she is from, or what year she was taken, but she’s been here the longest. Her little jeans are flared, and Stiles doesn’t think her Sesame Street raglan sleeve t-shirt is intentionally retro.

The towns they were from, and the families and friends they had there, no longer exist. And more than that, they never existed to begin with. These kids have been neatly excised from the world, along with everything that connected them to it. Why they’re still in the train station, they don’t know. Peter doesn’t know. Stiles doesn’t know.

Whatever these kids were waiting for in order to move on, it just never arrived.

 

***

 

It’s impossible to say how much time passes in the train station. Maybe it’s been hours since Stiles arrived before he has his breakdown. Maybe it’s been days or weeks or even longer than that. However long it’s been, it hits him all at once: his helplessness, his anger, his fear, and the sheer gut-wrenching fucking futility of acutely missing people who don’t even remember that he existed. It breaks out of him in a series of choking sobs, and he isn’t even allowed the dignity of having his breakdown in private.

Emily and Sanjeev are sitting right beside him. So is Poppy. So that’s a nice dose of humiliation on top of everything.

“Don’t,” he whispers in the darkness as Peter hauls him close. He scrubs at his eyes. “Just leave me alone.”

“Stiles,” Peter says, his voice low. “Just shut up and let me hug you.”

And just like that, Stiles stops fighting it. Because why the fuck not, right? Why the fuck not? As terrifying as the idea is, Peter Hale might just be the only thing Stiles has left.

It makes sense to hold onto him, right?

 

***

 

“We’re not going to die here,” Stiles murmurs some time later, and then feels the heat rise in his face when Peter’s sharp gaze lands on him. “That was, uh, kind of an internal pep talk, not, um…”

“Not a prediction?” The scant light catches on the curved edge of Peter’s smirk. “I know. Your heartbeat sounds different when you come out with those, and you’re not relaxed enough.”

Stiles noticed when he was younger that the more tired he gets, the more likely it is that he’ll start to spew out predictions. Like a tic or something, that gets stronger when Stiles’s concentration starts to drift. For a kid with ADHD, staying in control wasn’t always easy. It’s hard to think of that side of him—that place where the truth spills out—as a gift or anything like that. What was it Peter said about being different in this place? More of a curse than a blessing. Stiles has felt like that for years now. He’s not even sure why. It’s was instinctive at first maybe, this need to keep it secret. But now, knowing what he does about power and those who’ll do anything to grasp it, Stiles knows he was right to be afraid.

“How long have you known?” he asks Peter.

They’re sitting on the edge of the platform in the storage area, legs dangling over onto the tracks.

Peter knocks his shoulder against Stiles’s. “About what?”

Stiles snorts. About _what_? Of course Peter is keeping at least six million different secrets at once. Stiles shouldn’t have expected anything less. “About me.” And then, in case Peter’s sitting on some different revelations about Stiles that he doesn’t really want to expose to a conversation at the moment: “About the things I say sometimes. About them coming true.”

Peter shrugs. “I’ve known for a while. It didn’t take long to add up.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Really? Because it’s not the first conclusion most people would jump to.”

“I’m not most people,” Peter says. “And you’re rare, Stiles, but you’re not impossible.”

There’s something about the words, or maybe the way that Peter says them so softly, that fills Stiles with warmth.

“We’re going to figure this out,” he says. “I’m not dying in here. I’m not going to be forgotten. And neither are you, Peter.”

“I’ve always though of myself as unforgettable.”

Stiles can’t stop his smile. “You’re such an asshole.”

It’s nice though, to know that some things never change. It makes him think of werewolves and their anchors, and how that’s just a word for a very human need as well: that need to have something solid and unchangeable, some steadfast piece of faith at the core of your being, whether it’s god, or family, or philosophy…just something strong enough to hold up your sense of self when the wild maelstrom of fate threatens to tear it to shreds. And everyone might have forgotten that Stiles ever existed, but Peter’s still here, and Peter’s still an asshole.

It’s weirdly comforting.

“We are going to get out of this,” Peter tells him. “I wasn’t sure at first, but now I am.”

“What changed?” Stiles asks curiously, watching a dried leaf skip along the dark tracks, pushed by an invisible wind.

“You arrived,” Peter says, raising his eyebrows. “And I refuse to believe in a universe where Stiles Stilinski doesn’t prove himself extraordinary in every way. The Ghost Riders were doomed from the moment they took you too.”

Stiles’s startled laugh comes out more like a snort.

“You think I’m kidding,” Peter says, his smile growing. “But I promise you I’m not.”

Stiles elbows him. “Shut up, creeperwolf.”

Peter mimes zipping his lip.

“Idiot,” Stiles says, with no heat in the insult, and watches the leaf rattle down the tracks for a moment. “Peter?”

“Mmm?”

Stiles jumps down onto the tracks. “Where does the wind come from?”


	4. Chapter 4

From the moment he saw Stiles, Peter’s gums itched with the urge to drop his fangs and bite. He’d been flirting with the sharp edges of insanity at the time, but of all the urges that went away when Peter was killed and then resurrected himself, that one stuck around. There was something in the boy that called to Peter’s wolf, and it sure as hell wasn’t his fashion sense. The boy wore more plaid than a lumberjack, and his hair… Jesus, what the hell had he been thinking? His buzzcut had made him look like a kiwifruit with eyes. Thank God he’d finally grown it out.

Underneath that package, however lacking it had first appeared, there was a brain. A sharp brain, a sharper gaze, and a sarcastic streak that could cut through diamonds. Stiles talked a lot. Too much. But when Peter actually _listened_ —and he had the impression that Stiles’s habit of babbling had been fostered so that most people didn’t—well, that’s when things got interesting.

It was clear to Peter that Stiles was some form of soothsayer, just as it was clear that Stiles had no control whatsoever over his powers. This wasn’t some magical art that Stiles had studied or learned. Whatever this was, it came to him as naturally and spontaneously as manipulating mountain ash.

When Derek was finally comfortable with being an alpha, and had enough betas to consider branching out and looking for an emissary, Peter had suggested Stiles.

“Stiles?” Derek frowned. “No, Stiles will want to be Scott’s emissary.”

In fact, Stiles wasn’t given the choice because Alan Deaton refused to train him.

Stiles hadn’t asked, but apparently Scott had. And Peter, lurking in the darkness one night, had heard Scott talking to Derek.

“Deaton says he won’t train Stiles. That Stiles was already a trickser, way before the nogitsune.”

Peter had melted back into the shadows before waiting to hear Derek’s reply.

The nogistune.

Peter knows what it feels like to lose control of his body. Alright, so he hadn’t been an unwilling passenger when the alpha spark and his insanity had combined in a firestorm of bloodlust and revenge. He hadn’t been a victim, but he likes to think that his own experiences have given him at least a little insight into Stiles’s. Peter certainly carries the weight of his guilt around still, if only for Laura. He knows what it feels like to look down at his hands and wonder how they’d done the things he remembers them doing. He knows what it feels like to be afraid of losing control again.

He knows that Stiles is scared, and he knows that’s why Stiles hasn’t demanded that Deaton train him as an emissary. It’s perfectly understandable that Stiles is scared of magic. What’s far more interesting to Peter is the fact that Deaton is clearly scared of Stiles. There’s a lot of power in Stiles if Deaton is wary of him.

And Peter has always been attracted to power.

 

***

 

Stiles is twitching limbs and quick smiles. He’s nervous energy. He’s lighting in a bottle, or perhaps something a little more down to earth. He’s crickets in a coffee tin, chirping and leaping and rattling the sides. That’s all that some people see when they look at Stiles—a boy with too much energy, lacking the maturity to contain it. They see his ADHD, his pinball brain. They see one facet only, and Stiles is so much more than that.

Peter sometimes thinks that he’s the only person who truly sees it.

 

***

 

Once, months ago now, Peter stood on the roof of Derek’s building and stared out over Beacon Hills. It was a cold night; the sort where the brilliant stars seemed close enough to snag with the tips of his claws. He’d stood there, thinking—lurking, Stiles would have called it—until the pack meeting ended and, down on the street, the packs dispersed until only a blue Jeep remained.

A blue Jeep with a boy sitting on the hood.

_What are you waiting for, Stiles?_

But Peter was five floors up and too far away for Stiles to hear, so he didn’t bother call out.

A few moments later, his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he drew it out. It was a text message from Stiles: _Did you know that the earliest recoded cat to have a name was Nedjem. It means sweet. It lived during the reign of Thutmose III, 1479-1425 BC._

How very random.

How very Stiles.

The follow-up came a few minutes later: _I don’t think we’ll be remembered that long. I think we’ll be forgotten very soon._

The air felt suddenly colder.

Peter watched Stiles for a moment longer, still sitting hunched on the hood of his Jeep, and then went back inside again.

 

***

 

Peter has no plans to be forgotten. He has always known that he’s not done. Not when the fire took him. Not when Derek tore his throat out. Not when Scott tossed him into Eichen House. And not now either.

Peter is a survivor. That’s what he tells Sanjeev and Emily and Poppy. He’s a survivor, and that makes them survivors too.

When Stiles is dumped in the train station with them, he knows it for sure.

Stiles is here.

They’re going to make it out after all.

And then they’re going to be unforgettable.

 

***

 

“Peter?” Stiles asks. “Where does the wind come from?”

He jumps down onto the tracks and walks down the tunnel. The wind chases after him, fluttering at the edges of his open plaid over-shirt and doing wild things to his hair.

Peter, following, has to resist the urge to reach out and straighten his hair for him.

“Nowhere,” he tells Stiles, when a series of turns leads them back, inexplicably, to the waiting room. “It comes from nowhere.”

“Huh.” Stiles chews his bottom lip, his brow furrowed.

Peter knows that stubborn look all too well. Stiles might be flummoxed, but he’s a long way from admitting defeat.

 

***

 

Peter and Stiles crouch behind the seats with the rest of the panicking abductees, who have been roused from their docility by the impending arrival of the Ghost Riders. The air smells like the sky just before a storm hits—ozone and the promise of a storm—and then there’s a sudden crack of green lightning that makes Stiles’s eyes shine like a beta’s. Peter can’t resist the urge to curl his fingers around the back of the boy’s neck—an excuse to make him duck down a little further as a Ghost Rider bursts through the tear between this place and the real world.

It’s _loud_. The hooves of the horse crash against the tiles, and the whinny of the beast sounds more like a scream. The noise echoes in the waiting room, and bounces off the tiles, and gets jumbled in with the cries of the panicked people huddling there.

It’s bright too; the Rider brushes green sparks off his shoulders like they’re dust from the trail, and then flings his latest abductee to the grimy floor.

It’s a guy. A young guy. He smells human. And—Peter feels his breath catch—he looks more pissed than he does stunned. Peter would cheer for the guy as he clambers to his feet and turns around to face the Rider, if only he didn’t know exactly what was coming next.

The lightning-green portal is closing already, and the Rider has already turned toward it. And the new guy sees it too, and makes the connection that the only way in is also the only way out. Smart guy. Peter can see the moment he makes the decision to try and hitch a ride back.

Brave guy.

Stiles cranes his neck to see, and Peter tightens his grip protectively on the back of his neck.

The guy leaps for the back of the Rider’s horse a fraction of a second before it vanishes through the portal again.

His scream is cut short, but the stench of burning flesh lingers.

Poor guy.

Peter wishes he could say that seeing some unfortunate human burned instantly to a crisp in an inter-dimensional portal is the creepiest thing that he’s ever experienced in the train station, but it isn’t. Not by a long shot. The creepiest thing is the way the moment the portal closes again, that every human being inside the place calms instantly, and placidly returns to their seats and to their long, blank wait for a train that never comes.

It never fails to send a shiver down Peter’s spine.

“I’m guessing that’s not the way out,” Stiles says. His tone is nonchalant, but his heartbeat is rabbit fast. “For humans, at least.”

Peter reluctantly releases his grip on Stiles’s neck. He stands, and holds a hand down for Stiles. “I certainly wouldn’t advocate it.”

“Could a werewolf survive it?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says.

Stiles fixes him with a narrow-eyed stare, and Peter waits for the weight of his judgment to fall:

 _Coward_.

 _You didn’t even_ try _?_

_You couldn’t walk through fire one more time, Peter, not even for all your sins?_

_Not even if it meant getting out of here?_

He waits for a judgment that doesn’t come.

“Huh,” Stiles says, and quirks the corner of his mouth in an expression far too subtle to be called a smile, especially on his ridiculously expressive face.  

“What?” Peter asks, bristling, defensive.

Stiles shrugs. “I get it.”

Peter stares at him.

Stiles tilts his head on an angle. “What would you hate the most, Peter? That someone might actually think you were weak for not wanting to risk burning to death? _Again_? Or hey, maybe you’d get lucky like you did the first time around, and only get stuck in a coma for six years.”

Peter growls, feeling the rumble in his ribcage.

“Everyone’s seen that part of your underbelly, Peter. You’re not really hiding that at all, are you?” Stiles reaches out and places his hand on Peter’s chest, fingers splayed.

“You’re hiding _this_.”

Peter’s heart thumps under Stiles’s palm.

“A werewolf might survive hitching a ride back through,” Stiles says, his clever eyes widening, “but a little kid in a Sesame Street shirt wouldn’t, would she?”

“No,” Peter says, his throat dry. “No, she wouldn’t.”

Stiles presses his lips into a twitching line. He pulls his splayed fingers into a claw, then a fist. Punches Peter’s chest ineffectually. “You fucking sociopath. Can’t let out your great big secret, can you? That you’ve actually got a fucking heart?”

Peter thinks there should be more judgment in Stiles’s tone, but there isn’t. There’s only that smile, fighting its way clear.

“Fucking idiot,” Stiles says, and he sounds almost affectionate. He punches Peter’s chest again, although this time it’s hardly more than a brush of his knuckles against Peter’s shirt. And then his heartbeat slows and his eyes lose focus. “Would have been a dumb idea anyway.”

“Would it, sweetheart?” Peter asks softly.

“Dumb,” Stiles says, his voice soft, almost breathy. His scent shifts, and subtle notes of something unexpected creep in. He smells of faded ink, of old wood, of dust motes hanging in the still air. He smells like a library. His voice is soft when he speaks, as though it’s coming from very far away. “Can’t open the door from this side.”

“Can’t we?” Peter wants to lean in and press his mouth to Stiles’s carotid artery, and feel the beat of it when he’s like this. When the oracle overwhelms the boy. Peter inhales deeply and says, his voice pitched low to speak to the oracle instead of the boy, “I wonder who can.”

“Lydia,” Stiles says. His pupils are blown wide, as though he’s standing in a dark room. “Lydia can. Lydia will.” And then a shiver runs through him, and he suddenly seems to blink awake. “That just happened, right?”

“That just happened, clever boy,” Peter says.

How is Lydia supposed to open a door that she doesn’t even realize exists? When she doesn’t even know she should be looking, because she has forgotten that Stiles and Peter are missing? How are they even supposed to contact her from this place? Peter doesn’t care at this point. It doesn’t matter. Two tin cans and a string could do the fucking trick for all he cares.

All that matters is that Stiles has said it _will_ happen.

It’s inevitable now.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Stiles finds a radio in the train station—just an old two-way radio. It looks like the sort he found once in the basement at the Sheriff’s Department: ancient enough that it should be manned by a guy in a tie, a hat, a cigarette, and sepia tones: Just the facts, ma’am.

Stiles pushes the clunky press-to-talk button on the base of the microphone: _click click click_. Dead air. Dead air, except for the frisson of electricity that runs down Stiles’s spine. There’s something here. There’s something.

Stiles doesn’t know yet what it is, but there’s _something_.

 

***

 

“Hey, Stiles?” Sanjeev asks.

They’re lying on their backs on the cracked tiles of their hidden storage room, staring up at the cobwebs on the ceiling. Peter and Emily and Poppy have gone walking in the tunnels, because there isn’t anything much else to do here. Stiles almost envies the zombies in the waiting room, whose communal fugue state at least stops them from knowing they’re in a prison.

“Mmm?” Stiles turns his head to look at him.

“Peter thinks you can get us out of here,” Sanjeev says in an undertone. There’s a note of childish hope in his voice that sounds like he is trying hard to suppress. “Is that true?”

 _He’s young,_ Stiles thinks. Sanjeev is at that stage in his adolescence that Stiles still feels personally stuck in—the awkward, gangly stage. He even has a smattering of pimples across his forehead which, frankly, Stiles had assumed born werewolves were immune to—it’s hard to imagine any of the Hales awkward and acned. _He’s just a kid._

It’s shocking to realize that Stiles isn’t that much older.

“I don’t know,” Stiles says.

“Peter says you can see the future,” Sanjeev whispers.

“Peter’s wrong,” Stiles tells him. “I can’t see the future. Sometimes I speak it though.”

A cold thrill runs through him. He’s never admitted it aloud before, not in such a plain way. Isn’t the truth supposed to set you free? Maybe Stiles will feel a weight lift off his shoulders once the wave of nausea passes. Or maybe nausea is par for the course in this place.

“Oh.” Sanjeev mulls over that for a moment in silence, and then says: “But the things you say come true, right?”

“Yeah.” Stiles stares up at the ceiling, and counts the tiles.

“If you get us out of here…” Sanjeev’s voice falters and he clears his throat. “I mean, you know what it’s like here. It feels like it’s only been hours, but also like it’s been forever. The world’s going to be very different from what I remember, isn’t it? It’s not 1996 anymore.” He exhales heavily. “And my pack—it’s already gone, isn’t it? Like it never even existed?”

“Yeah.” Stiles reaches out and curls his hand over Sanjeev’s wrist. “I’m sorry.”

Sanjeev’s voice falters again. He’s trembling under Stiles’s touch. “If we even get out, what the hell are we supposed to _do_?”

Stiles doesn’t have an answer for that.

Not yet.

 

***

 

Three months ago now, maybe four.

It’s late, and Stiles is fidgety and on edge. He’s felt lately like his Adderall just isn’t working, and that he just can’t settle, just can’t focus, and maybe he needs to see about getting the dosage changed or something, except it only occurs to him at times like this, when it’s in the middle of the night and he can’t fucking _settle_.

His dad is at work, and the house is empty, and Stiles feels like he’s about to start bouncing off the walls. He can’t stop _thinking_. About Derek’s pack, and about Scott’s, and about how he’s stuck between them, and it feels like the narrowest space in the world. Feels like it’s suffocating him, and he just wants to scream. Something has to give, and he’s terrified it might be him.

“Peter was the alpha once,” Stiles says aloud to his empty room. He grabs his pillow, and thumps it a few times. Closes his eyes. Rolls over. Sits up, and starts the entire fucking process again.

“Peter was the alpha once,” he tells the shadows on the wall, goosebumps breaking out on his arms. “And he’s going to be the alpha _again_.”

The words—and the implication behind them—chill him to the core.

 

***

 

Stiles is playing with the radio when Peter finds him. _Click click click_ , and listening for blasts of static that don’t come. There’s something about the repetitive action that soothes him, that lets him stay anchored while his mind drifts.

From his position in the room with the radio—the old station master’s office?—he can see though the grimy frames of a window out into the waiting room. The people are still sitting there, still waiting. The times on the board don’t change.

 _Click click click_.

“The seems unproductive, sweetheart.” Peter’s voice is low, and his breath is warm on the back of Stiles’s neck.

“Mmm.” Stiles presses the button again: _click_.

Peter leans over him and brushes his fingers down the dials on the console. “Do you even know how any of this works?”

“Not really.” Stiles watches Peter’s fingertips transform into claws as they trail over the casing of the speaker. They make a faint, metallic thrumming sound.

Stiles thinks of radio waves, of sound waves, of quivers in the air that are translated by three tiny vibrating bones in the middle ear of a human— _malleus, incus, stapes_ , his brain supplies—and are pushed into the cochlea, and translated by the nerves there and sent as information into the brain.

He thinks of ripples in a pond.

He thinks of hurricanes forming when butterflies beat their delicate wings.

He thinks of Lydia, whose scream is a weapon.

Peter removes his hand from the console. He’s still standing behind Stiles. He puts his arms around Stiles, and he is warm and solid, a wall of heat at Stiles’s back. And Stiles should be afraid, shouldn’t he?

He isn’t.

He hasn’t been afraid of Peter since he got here.

Maybe since before that.

Sound, he thinks. Voices. Words. Truth. Screams.

“You were a voice once,” he murmurs, staring at the cords snaking out from behind the console of the radio. “You were a voice in Lydia’s head, weren’t you? A whisper in her mind, just out of the range of proper hearing. You were that moment before sleep, when you can hear voices in the distance, like someone’s left the TV on in the next room.”

He’s aware that he’s slipping into that headspace where his words come from a different place. He’s aware that Peter knows, and that he also knows that it’s easier for Stiles when he’s close. He’s aware that whatever he says next might be their key to escape, and that he shouldn’t fight this. He should go with it, wherever it takes him.

“Sound,” he says. “Voices. Words.”

Peter holds him.

“Truth,” Stiles says. He reaches out and tugs a cord free. There’s a connector plug hanging off the end, topped with a thin, cylindrical metal pin. “ _Lydia_.”

Peter and Lydia were connected before, when Peter used her to come back from the dead.

Stiles looks down to where Peter’s arms are wrapped around him. One of Peter’s hands is splayed above his heart. The veins in his forearms and the tendons in his wrists stand out like cords, like strings, like _wiring_.

“Peter,” he whispers. “ _Scream_.”

And he drives the connector plug into Peter’s forearm.

 

***

 

There’s blood, and not all of it is Peter’s.

Stiles feels Peter’s claws dig into his ribcage as he pulls himself away, diving for the microphone.

Peter howls.

Stiles pushes the button down and holds it. “Lydia? Lydia, can you hear me?”

And then, above the sound of the enraged werewolf behind him, Stiles hears a burst of static from the speaker, and a moment later a voice as clear as if she were standing right beside him:

_“Stiles?”_

Stiles roars too, in triumph.

 

***

 

When Stiles comes back to himself in blinking increments and a creeping sense of cold—when the voice inside him loses its grip and fades back into silence—the first thing he notices is the blood. There’s a lot of blood. Judging by his stinging ribs and tattered shirt, at least some of it is his. But most of it… most of it is not.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Stiles,” Peter mutters. “A little warning next time?”

There’s a cord sticking out of his forearm, blood still welling sluggishly around it as the wolf tries uselessly to heal.

“Shit. Peter…” Stiles’s mouth hangs open. “Did I _do_ that?”

Peter curls his lip, flashing a pointed fang. “Welcome back, sweetheart.”

“I…”

“The good news,” Peter says, “is that you also talked to Lydia, and while the door might be locked on this end, I’m betting they can break it down from the other side.”

Stiles furrows his brow. “I talked to Lydia? How is that even possible?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says. He tugs the cord free, wincing. “And I don’t particularly care. It worked; that’s the only thing that matters.”

Stiles is reaching out to touch the wound on Peter’s forearm before he realizes, and pulls himself back with a jerk. “Sorry, I… sorry.”

Peter quirks a brow and looks at him with his head on an angle.

Stiles’s heartbeat quickens. He’s apologizing for inflicting a small wound that’s already healing now the cable is out? How ridiculous. Stiles once threw a Molotov cocktail at Peter, and never apologized for that. This is nothing compared to then. But also, Peter has changed since that time, or Stiles has, or maybe they both have, and they’ve met somewhere in the middle. There used to be a clear line of demarcation between them. It got blurred a long time ago, if Stiles is honest. He’s just not sure if that’s because Peter has worked to raise himself to a higher standard, or if Stiles has sunk to his level. It feels like the sort of thing that Stiles should have wondered about before now, but frankly he’s too tired to care. It’s just nice not to be alone.

They’re going to make it out of here.

That’s always been the truth.

Peter is going to be an alpha again one day.

That’s always been the truth too.

And Stiles…

He lifts his gaze to meet Peter’s. Holds it. “I’m going to be your emissary when you’re an alpha again.”

He tilts his head, exposing the column of his throat.

Peter’s eyes flash blue, and his teeth gleam when he smiles and leans in.

Stiles feels his heart beating in his throat, and closes his eyes as sharp fangs scrape against his jugular.

“Alpha,” he says, the word breathed out of him like a sigh.

Not yet. Not _yet_ … but soon.

 


	6. Chapter 6

When Stiles tells him that he’ll be an alpha again, Peter is tempted to ask which one of them he’s destined to kill: Scott or Derek? His only surviving relative from before the fire, or Stiles’s best friend? But there’s no condemnation in Stiles’s tone when he speaks his truth, no horror, so perhaps that part of the equation isn’t written yet. There are plenty of other alphas in the world, of course, and more than a few who would only be improved by a sudden, bloody death. Deucalion, for starters. But the thing about prophecies, Peter knows, is that they can no more be forced as they can be avoided. Ask Oedipus’s father. Try and go your own way with a prophecy, and sooner or later you’re dead on the road, and your son’s fucking his mother anyway. Whatever happens will happen.

He has more to worry about than his nebulous forthcoming alpha-hood anyway. Stiles got through to Lydia, using Peter as his conduit, which means that sooner or later someone will be mounting a rescue. Meaning that they have to be ready to get the fuck out of here the moment the door between worlds opens.

They need to be ready; Peter, and Stiles, and the kids.

When it happens, it’s not the door opening so much as it is every wall suddenly collapsing and the ceiling coming down. Suddenly the thralls in the waiting room are awake again, panicking and shrieking, and there are riders inside the station, and screams echo off the walls of the tunnels. It’s chaos, and Poppy is wailing as Peter scoops her up.

“Go!” he yells, hustling the kids down the track in front of him. “Keep moving!”

Emily trips and stumbles, dragging Sanjeev down with her, but Stiles is there—Stiles is _always_ there when it counts—and he’s helping them up and they’re still moving down the tunnel, and Peter can see light ahead—

It’s not green light.

It’s natural light.

It’s _home_ , and it’s so close that Peter’s heart skips a beat in sharp anticipation.

And then he hears the clatter of hooves behind him.

 

***

 

When Peter was eight, years before fire touched him, his grandfather showed him how to plant tulips. The bulbs had to be chilled first, and the soil carefully selected. Some fertilizers could burn the bulbs. Soil that was too damp could rot them. And if the temperature was wrong, then they’d never take root at all.

Peter was so proud when all his hard work and patience paid off and he spied the first shoots poking through the cold soil.

The next morning when he tramped eagerly downstairs to see how much they’d grown overnight, he found his tiny garden torn up.

Later, his mother asked him if he understood what it meant to be born as the left hand of a pack, and Peter learned a very valuable lesson: that a left hand wasn’t supposed to nurture.

 

***

 

An outsider might call it heroism.

An outsider would be fucking wrong.

Peter’s not pumped up on thoughts of righteousness and justice when he turns to face the ghost rider: it’s his belief in destiny that he’s drawing all his courage from, and his destiny is written in stone. Stiles says he will become an alpha again. That is the truth. And Peter’s not an alpha yet, so he’s not dying here, not today. Fuck heroism; Peter has _logic_ on his side.

“Peter,” Stiles says, eyes wide.

Peter bundles Poppy over into his arms. “Take the kids. _Run_.”

“Peter!”

“Not now, sweetheart,” Peter tells him, rolling his shoulders to loosen them, and popping his claws. “I’ve got a ghost rider to kill.”

Peter feels powerful again, and it feels good. He’s in control here, when for so long he hasn’t been. This is what Peter was born to do: just point himself at a threat and let his fangs and claws come out. He’s Peter Hale, left hand, enforcer, and killer. And _nobody_ is going to hurt Stiles or the kids.

He roars.

The ghost rider’s horse rears up, hooves flashing, and Peter spins out of the way. He buries his claws in its neck as it comes down hard, and relishes the hot spray of blood against his face. The horse screams, unseating its rider, and turns and bolts back the way it came.

The rider rises slowly to his feet. Peter can’t make out a face under the brim of his hat, but a pair of eyes burn like coals in the blackness there.

“Not so tough now, are you?” Peter taunts. “Not without your My Little Pony.”

A strangled sound from behind him—half terrified and half amused—lets him know that Stiles is still here, and Peter really regrets that he couldn’t come up with a more famous horse reference that that one. He probably should have gone with Bucephalus. Would that have been too obscure? Too snobbish, even for Peter? Probably, yes, but Peter would rather be thought of as a snob any day of the week than be mistaken for a brony. He has a feeling Stiles is never going to let him live this down.

“Peter!” Stiles calls.

“Not now, Stiles.” Peter flicks his wrist, splattering blood from his dripping claws. Stiles’s heartbeat is racing, and Peter can smell the acrid stench of his fear. It smells like ashes. He keeps his eyes on the ghost rider as he speaks. “You need to trust your words, Stiles. You said that I will become an alpha again, which means I don’t die here. Not like this.”

“Peter, I—”

“When you’re my emissary, Stiles, we’re going to work on your self confidence.” Peter steps back, measuring the gait of the ghost rider. “It’ll be first on our To Do list, but in the meantime I’d really appreciate it if you’d shut the fuck up, take the kids, and _run_.”

He doesn’t have the chance to look and see if Stiles complies or not, because suddenly the ghost rider is on him, in a cloud of dust and sulfur. Peter roars in pain as a line of fire wraps around his right wrist, tightening and pulling, the flesh underneath it tearing. The rider’s whip. Peter grips it tightly in his fingers, ignoring the burn, and wrenches on it. He hasn’t got the strength to tear it out of the rider’s grasp, but at least it’s out of play for both of them now.

Peter’s instinct is to go for the rider’s throat, and the rider must know it too: he raises his free hand as though to protect himself.

Instinct is so useful, but it’s not all that Peter has.

When the rider lifts his hand, Peter grabs for his gun instead. He has it unholstered before the rider even realizes, and then he’s pressing the barrel into the rider’s stomach and firing.

A sharp crack, a flash of light, a puff of green smoke, and the rider stumbles backward.

Peter reels him in again using the whip, and fires again. He has no idea if a ghost rider can even be killed, but it seems like a waste of bullets not to try.

He fires a third time, and then a fourth, and the ghost rider jerks like a fish on a line, still tethered to Peter by the whip. His head falls back, and that’s when Peter lunges forward and tears his throat out.

He doesn’t taste of blood, but of something sour and dry. Peter spits out flesh and sinew, and the ghost rider drops to the floor of the tunnel. He lies on the track, unmoving.

Peter carefully unwraps the tail of the whip from around his wrist. His skin is split, and he can see bone, but the wound begins to knit as Peter watches.

He takes the whip, grimacing, and bends over the fallen ghost rider. He wraps the whip around the rider’s throat, tight, and then takes an end in each hand. He summons all his strength, and pulls.

The sound is something it’s going to take at least an entire bottle of _Domaine Leroy Chambertin Grand Cru_ 1990—with wolfsbane added to give it an actual kick—to forget. It does the trick though. Peter has no fucking idea if the ghost riders are able to regenerate or not, but it’s going to be pretty difficult for this asshole to manage it without a head.

Peter curls his fingers around the grip of the whip.

“Peter!”

He turns to see Stiles and the kids waiting further down the tunnel for him. He closes the distance between them. “I thought I told you to run.”

Stiles juts out his chin. “Dude, you killed that thing in like thirty seconds. How much further do you think I would have gotten?”

Peter uses his shirt to wipe his face. “Thirty seconds?” He smirks. “Even I’m impressed.”

“Of course you are, you smug asshole.”

Poppy holds her arms out toward Peter, and Peter takes her. “We are going to talk about your self esteem though, Stiles. You need to start trusting in your gift. I can’t die until I’m an alpha again. There was nothing to worry about.”

Sanjeev and Emily exchange a glance.

Stiles raises his eyebrows.

“What?” Peter asks.

Poppy puts her hands on his cheeks, and searches his face wonderingly. “Peter! You got red eyes!”

A chill runs through him. “What did you say, kitten?”

“You’re already an alpha, Peter,” Stiles tells him. “Your eyes flashed red when you told me to take the kids and run. Idiot.”

The blood roars in Peter’s skull. “I’m… but that’s _impossible_.”

“Is it?” Stiles asks. His mouth quirks. “I guess Scott’s not so special anymore. He’s gonna be _pissed_.”

“I’m an _alpha_ ,” Peter says slowly. He closes his eyes for a moment, and tries to feel the alpha spark inside him. It feels different than last time. Stronger, calmer. A steady flame instead of a wild inferno. He feels his new pack bonds unfurling, reaching out for Stiles, for Sanjeev and Emily, and for Poppy. He feels Poppy’s fingers pressing into his cheeks, and opens his eyes again. “I’m an alpha.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, the word whispered on a breath. “You’re an alpha.”

Peter doesn’t know how he feels about that. Not yet. He suspects he will need time to process it, to reconcile it. He swallows, and clears his throat. “Let’s go home.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “Let’s go home.”

 

 

***

 

It’s chaos, and Peter has always liked chaos. It’s easy to slip through the cracks when the world is being torn apart. There’s another ghost rider, and some sort of Nazi ghost rider—when the fuck did _that_ happen?—that Stiles takes care of with a pole. And then there is Lydia’s scream, which sends the rest of the riders scuttling back into hell.

And then are the reunions.

In the chaos, nobody seems to notice Peter is an alpha. Derek gives him a strange look, but there’s so much else going on that his nephew doesn’t have time to wonder—although Peter won’t be surprised if Derek wakes up in a cold sweat at some point in the middle of the night when his subconscious works it out—and he claps Peter on the shoulder before diving into the tunnels after his betas.

Scott embraces Stiles, and nods at Peter.

Lydia, of course, notices in a heartbeat.

“Huh,” she says, her gaze calculating.

Peter doesn’t know if she’ll end up in his pack one day, or if she’ll kill him. Either would be fitting, he supposes.

“Dad!” Stiles yells suddenly, and flings himself into the sheriff’s arms.

There are tears on both sides.

“Peter,” Emily says in a quiet voice. She doesn’t finish her thought. She doesn’t have to. There are no families waiting for her and Sanjeev and Poppy.

Peter gathers them close. “We’re pack,” he tells them. “We’re pack now, and pack sticks together.”

He can’t replace their families. He knows that. But they don’t have to be alone.

Sanjeev’s lip wobbles, and Peter pulls him in for a hug.

“We’re pack,” he repeats.

He catches Stiles’s gaze over the top of Emily’s head, and finds himself returning his emissary’s shaky smile.


	7. Chapter 7

Stiles’s dad is awesome. He raises his eyebrows when Peter and the kids come home with Stiles, and Stiles knows that means he’s got a shitload of questions, but he also knows that Stiles is bone weary, and doesn’t have the energy to even begin explaining things right now. Instead, he dumps a stack of towels in the bathroom, and sets about hunting down clean clothes. Then he sits Poppy down beside the bathroom sink, and begins to wipe away the face paint she’s been wearing since the 1970’s.

It takes a while, but sooner or later everyone is clustered in the living room. Sanjeev and Emily are wearing Stiles’s clothes—they almost fit. Peter is in a Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department Softball Team T-shirt and a pair of track pants. Poppy is wearing Stiles’s old stud muffin T-shirt as a dress.

“I’m ordering pizzas,” Stiles’s dad says, and squeezes Stiles on the shoulder before he goes to make the call.

He’s awesome.

 

***

 

After pizza, Stiles leaves the kids crashed on mattresses in the living room, and climbs the steps to his bedroom. It’s weird. His dad tells him he was gone for months. It doesn’t feel like months. It feels like hours, if anything, but whenever Stiles tries to get a sense of how time passed in the train station, he can’t concentrate on it. It feels a little like thinking back to a time he was drunk or something. He can remember a few things—actions and conversations and the sequences of events—but he has no concept of how much time passed between them occurring.

It’s unsettling.

He stands in front of his bookshelf, fingers brushing the spines of his favorite books. There’s a familiarity in these things, but at the same time they feel as ephemeral as Stiles was. When he was missing, his room wasn’t _here_. It had vanished, just like he had. And he’s back now, he knows that, but the ground doesn’t feel solid underneath his feet.

“Existential crisis?” an arch voice inquires from the doorway.

“Asshole,” Stiles says, fighting a smile. He turns around as Peter approaches, and it somehow feels completely natural to step into Peter’s embrace. For a moment it does, and then he tenses. “I don’t want…”

“Shh.” Peter’s breath is hot, and his mouth is warm against Stiles’s pulse point. “I know, sweetheart.”

Stiles closes his eyes, and his breath shudders out of him.

“I’m just learning your scent,” Peter tells him, inhaling deeply. He straightens a little, and presses his mouth against Stiles’s temple and the sweat-damp skin of his hairline. “That’s all.”

There’s a reason Stiles was obsessed with Lydia for so long. A reason he set himself that impossible target. Because at least this way he could still pretend he was playing the same game as everyone else. He should have known from the start though, when his third grade fantasies of holding hands and sharing curly fries never transformed into anything else.

“Just this,” Peter murmurs. “This is enough, Stiles. This is more than enough. We’re out of that place, and we’re a pack, and you, my darling boy, are going to be _magnificent_.”

Stiles makes a noise caught between a laugh and a sob. “So you’re an oracle now too, huh?”

He can feel the shape Peter’s mouth makes when he smiles against his temple. “I don’t have to be an oracle to know this, sweetheart, trust me.”

“I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you,” Stiles mutters.

Peter laughs. “Liar.”

“We make a good pair then.”

Peter presses a chaste kiss to his temple. “We certainly do.”

“Peter?” Stiles makes his voice questioning, vulnerable. “There’s one big problem.”

Peter’s eyes flash red. “What?”

“It’s…” Stiles bites his lip. “You’re my alpha right, and I’m your emissary?”

“That’s right.”

“I… I don’t think it’s going to work, Peter.” He widens his eyes. “I mean, My Little Pony? _Seriously_?”

For a moment Peter is expressionless, and then he rolls his eyes. “You little shit! I knew you wouldn’t let that go!”

Delight bubbles up inside him. “I mean, that’s the franchise, Peter! You didn’t even name an actual pony! Do you know their names? God, I bet you do, don’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“Do you have the figurines at home? Do you play with them?”

“Shut up.” But Peter’s fighting a smile.

“Will you let _me_ play with them?”

“Asshole.” Peter jabs him in the side.

Stiles laughs. “Right back at you, alpha!”

 

 

***

 

In the morning Stiles shuffles into the kitchen to find Peter making bacon and eggs, and his dad sitting in front of an empty plate with a guilty expression on his face. Stiles glowers at Peter first, and then his dad, and then slumps into a chair at the kitchen table and waits for his brain to wake up and catch up with his body.

Across the table, Sanjeev is digging into a pile of scrambled eggs, and Emily is sipping from a glass of juice. Poppy is sitting beside Stiles’s dad, a rasher of bacon in each hand. She has freckles. Stiles hadn’t noticed under her face paint. It’s weird to see her without whiskers.

Peter sets a plate down in front of him and returns to the stove.

Stiles flashes him a sleepy smile.

He doesn’t know if he can feel the pack bonds the same way a werewolf can—probably not—but there’s a warmth building inside him as he looks around the table. It feels _right_ , and it’s been a long time since things felt right. The nogitsune carved out places inside him, left him hollow and ready to crumble, but now he feels almost whole again. He has an alpha, and he has a pack, and he has his dad.

“After breakfast, I’m taking the kids to Macy’s,” Peter says. “Their wardrobes will need updating if they’re going to blend in, and nobody should be subjected to your graphic tees all the time.”

“Walmart’s closer.”

“Walmart is also Walmart.” Peter shudders.

Stiles flips him the bird.

Poppy giggles, and his dad rolls his eyes.

After breakfast Peter and the kids head off. Sanjeev and Emily are still in their borrowed clothes, and Poppy is back in her jeans and her Sesame Street shirt. Stiles is sure they’ll all come home looking like they fell out of the pages of a catalogue. God forbid Peter’s pack won’t all look Instagram ready.

Stiles helps his dad load the dishwasher.

“You and Peter,” his dad says awkwardly, and clears his throat.

“I’m his emissary,” Stiles says. “He’s an alpha again, and I’m his emissary. Not… not what you’re thinking.”

“Are you sure about that, kid?” His dad’s forehead is creased in concern. “The way you two were looking at each other—and that’s _fine_. I mean, if that’s what you want, that’s fine. Peter is…” He trails off unhappily.

“Peter is nobody’s first choice for a son-in-law,” Stiles snorts, straightening up before leaning back against the counter. “It’s complicated, Dad, but we’re not having sex.”

“That’s…” His dad looks relieved. “That’s also fine.”

Stiles doesn’t mention that not having sex and not being in a relationship aren’t the same thing. He thinks that whatever it is he feels for Peter, and Peter feels for him, that this is _it_ for him. This is what he wants and needs. That Peter can be his alpha, and his partner in all things, and sex doesn’t even enter into the equation. But in the meantime, he can dodge his dad’s concerns by saying they’re not having sex. It’s a loophole, but Stiles is happy to exploit it for now and, frankly, for as long as he can get away with it.

“Peter’s an alpha again?” his dad asks. “Who did he—”

“Nobody,” Stiles says. “He didn’t kill anyone.” _This time_. “He was in there for longer than I was, and I think that he started looking after Emily and Sanjeev because they were werewolves, and Poppy because, well, she’s _something_ , and I think maybe that he became an alpha again because he was acting like one. I don’t really know. He told me to get them to safety. He stood between us and a ghost rider. That’s when his eyes turned red again.”

“When he protected you?”

“Yeah.” Stiles worries at a thread on the hem of his shirt. “I think that’s when it happened.”

“And you’re his emissary?” His dad’s brow creases. “Are you something too, Stiles?”

Stiles drops his gaze. “Yeah, I think so.”

“When did this happen? Was it the nogitsune?”

Stiles barely represses a shudder. “No, I think it was before that.”

“You don’t sound so sure, kid.”

“It was.” Stiles looks up, and holds his dad’s gaze. His heart beats faster. “It’s always been in me. I say things that come true, Dad, and it’s not my ADHD, or being smart, or noticing stuff other people don’t, and it’s not just a coincidence.”

“You make things come true?”

“No. I just say they’re going to happen before they do.”

The silence stretches out for a while between them, and Stiles can’t read it. He watches a hundred different expressions travel across his dad’s face, and then his dad clears his throat.

“When your mom was dying, do you remember what you told me?”

Tears sting Stiles’s eyes as he nods. “I said you’d forget me too.”

“And I said that was impossible.” His dad blinks, eyes glistening. “Jesus, Stiles. I’m so sorry.”

He pulls Stiles into a hug.

Stiles buries his face in his dad’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. How could you know?”

It’s like his dad doesn’t hear him. He just holds him tighter. “I’m so sorry, kiddo. I’m so sorry.”

They stand like that for a very long time, in front of the humming dishwasher.

 

***

 

Peter and the kids return laden with bags from Macy’s. Stiles spends the day helping Sanjeev and Emily come to grips with their new smart phones, while reruns of Sesame Street play in the background for Poppy. She watches, clutching her talking Cookie Monster. She got the Cookie Monster, Peter tells Stiles in a low voice, because she didn’t know who Elmo was. It’s weird to think she was probably born before Peter, and maybe even before Stiles’s dad.

Peter sits beside him on the couch, and opens his laptop.

“What are you doing?” Stiles asks.

“I’m going to need a new place.” Peter opens a page of real estate listings. “Somewhere big enough for the pack. And we’ll need to get some IDs for the kids. Deaton can probably help with that.”

“No.” Stiles narrows his eyes.

“I don’t trust him either,” Peter says, “but he does have connections.”

“So does Chris Argent.” Stiles holds Peter’s gaze.

“You make a good point.” Peter smiles slightly. “I’ll ask Christopher.”

Stiles lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. It’s good to know he doesn’t have to explain his misgivings about Deaton to Peter. That either Peter shares them, or that he is at least willing to listen to Stiles.

“Are you sure you’re not jumping the gun though?” Stiles asks, unease tightening in his stomach.

“In regards to?”

“There are already two packs in Beacon Hills,” Stiles says, hating the way his voice wavers. “Is there really room for a third?”

Peter’s eyes flash red, and he smirks. “Too bad for them, sweetheart, because we’re already here, and this is our home too.”

“Yeah.” Stiles can’t stop himself from smiling. “You’re right. This is our home too."


	8. Chapter 8

It’s a Wednesday night. The moon is full and fat and hangs low in the sky. There’s a chill in the air that Peter finds bracing, but he checks that Poppy has her coat buttoned up when they climb out of the car.

The pack meeting is at Derek’s loft. It’s not neutral territory exactly, but it’s big enough to hold both the packs of Beacon Hills—Melissa McCall’s living room gets too crowded—and so pack meetings happen here by default. It’s right on the edge of the shady part of town where the pizza delivery guys don’t like to go, but Derek tipped them generously enough in the beginning for them to overcome their fears, and now he’s a regular customer.

Sanjeev and Emily are nervous, and trying to hide it.

“It’s fine,” Peter says, leading them up the stairs. “Whatever happens, you’ll be safe.”

“Scott and Derek are good guys,” Stiles says, which Peter feels might be pushing it, frankly. “We’ll make this work.”

Stiles is carrying Poppy on his hip. Strange how well it suits him. Strange how easily he seems to carry the burden of the darkness he has known within him. Perhaps though, it just makes him a better protector. Stiles is no idealist. He knows exactly what’s waiting in the night, and he knows exactly how to kill it. A hero—a _good_ man—might hesitate. Stiles wouldn’t. He _won’t._

He’s perfect.

They arrive at Derek’s door just as the pizza delivery guy is leaving.

Pack night in Beacon Hills.

Nothing much has changed.

Scott and Derek are sitting on opposite couches in the large living space, their packs spread out around them. There’s a little mingling together on the edges: Mason and Danny are looking at something on Danny’s phone, Lydia is perched on the arm of Scott’s couch leaning in to talk to Allison, and Cora is taking to Hayden. Generally though, the lines between the packs are obvious.

Nothing much has changed. At the same time, everything has.

“Hello children,” Peter says as he steps through the doors with his pack behind him. He flashes his red alpha eyes. “Miss me?”

 

***

 

“You’re such a dick though,” Stiles says, hours later when the metaphorical smoke has finally cleared. _“Miss me?_ Fuck!”

 

***

 

“You’re an alpha,” Derek says flatly. Derek says everything flatly. He’s about as expressive as a rock. He wasn’t always like this, but Peter knows neither of them like to dwell on that. The past is dangerous territory for both of them, full of guilt and blame and bitter recriminations.

“I am,” he says, and folds his arms over his chest.

“Who did you kill?” Scott demands, clenching his fingers into fists.

“Nobody,” Peter says, and waits for them to call him a liar.

“It’s true.” Stiles doesn’t give them the chance, stepping forward to stand beside his alpha. “It just happened.”

Scott looks almost outraged, as though Peter suddenly manifesting an alpha spark out of thin air is a personal affront to him. Of course, it probably is. Deaton’s spent a long time telling Scott how rare a True Alpha is, how _special_. It’s certainly not a prize he’s happy to share with Peter. Poor Scott is going to have to adjust his worldview to make this fit, isn’t he? How fun for Peter.

Derek looks serious, the corners of his mouth downturned. Peter doesn’t read much into that. Resting bitch face is Derek’s default expression. Again, it wasn’t always like this, but… But life has beaten Derek down. It’s taken all his soft edges and hardened them. Derek might be a survivor, but he takes no delight in it, whereas Peter has learned that sometimes the twisted joy of still being alive is the only thing that gets him through the day.

Until now, probably.

Until Stiles.

Until _pack_.

All his life Peter has been told that an alpha creates a pack, but only now does it occur that the opposite is also true: the pack creates the alpha. Peter’s alpha power is tied intrinsically to Stiles, and to Sanjeev and Emily, and to Poppy. They are the source of his power, of his strength, and of his will.

“You’re a True Alpha?” Danny asks, his brow creased as he tries to puzzle it out. Danny has been trained as an emissary under Deaton’s watchful eye. Of course he’s been fed all that nonsense about worthiness.

“Apparently,” Peter says, and can’t stop his smirk from growing.

“Huh,” Danny says, and blinks as he files the information away. “Okay, so how are we going to work this?”

Smart boy.

Peter would probably try to recruit him if he didn’t already have the smartest emissary in Beacon Hills.

 

***

 

There’s a lot of arguing. There’s even some yelling, and some smashing of things. They aren’t Peter’s things, so he doesn’t particularly care, but it annoys him that it makes his betas anxious, and makes Poppy startle.

“They aren’t _bad_ ,” Stiles says in response to something Poppy whispers in his ear as she clings to him. “They’re just acting like shits. And you know what?” He raises his voice. “You call us when you’re ready to talk terms and territories. But if you want to throw your wolfy tantrums then you’re just wasting out time. Let’s go, alpha.”

Peter smirks around the room again, taking in the shocked faces of both packs, and follows Stiles and the kids out the door.

He takes them to Wendy’s for frosties. They’ve earned it.

 

***

 

They drive out to the Preserve to let Sanjeev and Emily shift and run and feel the earth underneath their paws after too long in the train station. Peter and Stiles sit on the hood of Peter’s car with Poppy between them, and they study the stars.

“It’s gonna be a mess,” Stiles says after a while, but his tone is amused. There’s no breathy intonation in it that means it’s a prophecy. Just an observation then, and a valid one.

“Mmm.” Peter stares up at the Milky Way. He’s read that stargazing can make a lot of people feel small and insignificant. Peter never has, but lack of ego has never been a problem for him. “Very probably, yes.”

“But we’re going to figure it out,” Stiles decides. The moonlight makes his skin glow. He flashes Peter a smile. “Aren’t we, alpha?”

“Are you ever going to use my actual name again?”

Stiles’s smile grows. “Don’t even pretend you don’t like it, _alpha_.”

“Brat.”

“Yeah, but I’m _your_ brat.”

“You are, sweetheart,” Peter agrees, stroking Poppy’s hair. “You and I, Stiles, we were both waiting for pack, weren’t we? All this time?”

“Yeah.” Stiles reaches out and catches his hands. Twines his fingers through Peter’s. “I’m glad we found it.”

“Me too, sweetheart,” Peter says, his gaze catching the starlight in Stiles’s eyes. “Me too.”

 


End file.
